Mrs Overall would never be asked to present the Today programme. Photograph: PA

As beauty is in the eye of its beholder, intelligence is in the ear of the listener. Or, in the case of the BBC manager who told business reporter Steph McGovern that he didn't realise "people like you" – ie with regional accents – "were clever", stupidity is in the ear of the stupid. McGovern writes in next week's Radio Times that her soft Middlesbrough accent attracts adverse comment from viewers who believe that anyone betraying signs of having once been working class should not be nicking jobs from the middle class.

For those who know what it's like to open your mouth and see the person opposite dock your IQ by 40 points, only for them to raise a gratified – sometimes visibly amazed – eyebrow once you've successfully completed a sentence, McGovern is a hero for breaking ranks. She's shown up her own employer for its institutional classism, and its viewers for swallowing whole the idea that the only acceptable public voice is that which matches the uniform drone of the professional elite.

Having a Brummie accent hasn't done me that much harm professionally, although some might say I've got a good voice for newspapers. Imagine Mrs Overall reading this piece aloud to you and you might understand why I haven't yet been asked to present the Today programme. It's true that I might have had a better chance of doing so had the English don interviewing me for a place at Cambridge in 1993 not laughed out loud when I started reading out a Wordsworth sonnet, sight unseen. I've been telling him to sod off in my mind ever since.

There is a basic immutability to my accent, which has survived two decades of living in places other than Birmingham – three years at university with people who spoke either received pronunciation or cockney, and a whole career working mostly with people whose voices, for better or worse, don't root them in one particular place or class. Either I have a deep kernel of stubbornness, which won't allow me to let go of it, or it's simply that it would take more conscious effort than I'm prepared to invest.

In any case, the homogenising pressure of entry into the middle class has done plenty of work on my behalf. The vowels are softer now. Language mutates along with accent, often without you realising. I've no idea when I stopped calling lunch "dinner", and dinner "tea", so seamless was their replacement. All I know is that I used to get confused when our teachers would ask what we had for "supper": apropos Stuart Maconie, the BBC radio presenter whose rich Wigan accent I never tire of, it was usually some cream crackers in front of Juliet Bravo.

The only thing I care about is speaking clearly, and neither McGovern nor Maconie swallows a single syllable. There's nothing authentic about chewing your vowels so hard that no one can understand you. Working as a music journalist several years ago, I interviewed a young band from Dundee who believed that the best way to show me how rough – how authentic – they were was to ensure that not a single word they said into my tape recorder was intelligible. I suppose their message to the kids was that they hadn't got one. If you grew up on an estate far out from the centre, yet full of adults umbilically attached to the inner-city districts where they were raised, speaking Brummie was the thing that kept you attached to the city. The socio-linguist Paul Kerswill gives a crisp description of how the rush to the cities during the industrial revolution created the class divisions we live with now, and "a divergence in speech at the level of dialect and accent". Emerging cities such as Manchester and Leeds quickly developed what linguists call class-based social dialects or "sociolects".

It figures, then, that McGovern has been told by more than one kind viewer that she can't have gone to university, as she'd have lost her accent if she had. Given that only a tiny percentage of the population used to go to university, the great majority of that percentage coming from the upper middle class, the sociolect of academia is an elite one.

The more people from Teesside who go to university, the more – in theory – the sociolect of Middlesbrough and places like it will begin to enter the academy, and it'll no longer seem so strange to hear someone who is audibly from northern England, with audibly urban and probably working-class roots, commenting on the day's affairs on national television. Who knows, we may even allow someone like that to lead the Labour party, and desert the rightwing press when they call him or her a "thicko" or a "windbag".